I had the privilege to meet a gentleman in his 50s who is a guest lecturer at a university in Kobe, Hyogo and teaches handicrafts to children at kindergartens. During a casual conversation, he said that according to a research done by a (I don’t remember which) university in Tokyo, children whose names end with 子 (ko) are more sensible and obedient.
My first thought was that the suggestion that the name you are given has some effect on how you will turn out is bull. But when I gave this hypothesis more thought, I realised that it may be less of the name you are given but more of the people who gave you the name.
In this time, I have met lots of people of the opinion that names ending with ko are passé. Parents nowadays want their children to be different and have special and cool names. Even more so, names with kanji characters so rare, nobody can read. Why else do you think furigana is necessary in application forms? Although it’s really also because the Japanese law has it that you can choose any kanji and give it any reading. For example, a child’s name can be written as 薔薇 (bara), which means rose, but read as さくら (sakura), which means cherry blossom.
This really means that parents who still stick with names ending with ko have more traditional ways of thinking than other parents. In this sense, they would most likely have more traditional ways of raising, teaching and disciplining their children. This could probably be the reason why the percentage of sensible children with names ending with ko is significantly higher than those otherwise.
I admit that this would include the pre-supposition that traditional ways of raising children equates to more sensible kids. Though I do agree that this could very well be a fallacy in argumentation, unless the ko sound has some kind of neurological effect on children, I think this makes more sense than the hypothesis that the simple action of giving a name alters a child’s character.
